Context & Background
The Oak Hills Local School District is located on the western side of Cincinnati Ohio and it was well overdue for a strategic plan. It had been more than 18 years since the OHLSD completed a comprehensive strategic planning process - one that would guide the district over the next three to five years. In 2019 leaders started their work on strategic planning. They gathered community input across the 7,800 student K-12 district which led to the development of their five guiding pillars: Teaching & Learning, Social Emotional and Mental Health, Equity and Diversity for All, Quality Environments and Quality Learning, and Destination District.
Then the pandemic hit in March of 2020. The immediacy of the crisis meant that they needed to shift their attention to distance learning, support for students and families; and so, they put the entire strategic planning process on pause.
This pause allowed OHLSD to re-examine the systems that drive their work - the meetings, decision making processes, and the project planning. Christian Long, the Digital Innovation Administrator for the district reflected, “We spend so much time in education talking about content, curriculum, what’s best for students and what’s best for our district, that we often don’t spend enough time talking about how we do the work.” Meetings were often a chance for leaders to make decisions and share successes; however the team didn’t have a common language for meeting structures, or a clear purpose for each type of meeting, nor the habits for kicking off each project successfully.
A program provided by Google, through the Chromebook Credit for Transformation Services, OHLSD was able to engage Education Elements - a national K-12 consultancy that helps districts address a variety of complex questions. Education Elements has helped thousands schools shift to more student-centered learning, and helped hundreds of school districts to - among other things - develop their return-to-school and strategic plans and address systems through an equity-focused lens.